


Lindra's Cave

by Ruis



Category: Original Work
Genre: Cave Explorer & Tiny Dragon Who's Never Been Outside the Giant Cave - Freeform, Fantasy, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-04
Updated: 2019-05-04
Packaged: 2020-02-25 23:13:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18711619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruis/pseuds/Ruis
Summary: The evening light followed Lindra surprisingly far into the cave. It danced on the walls, reflected by thousands of tiny crystals, and even by the dust in the dry air.





	Lindra's Cave

**Author's Note:**

  * For [facethestrange](https://archiveofourown.org/users/facethestrange/gifts).



The evening light followed Lindra surprisingly far into the cave. It danced on the walls, reflected by thousands of tiny crystals, and even by the dust in the dry air. Lindra knew it was a quite common metamorphic rock, yet on the unweathered cave walls, the view was spectacular. Tiny pieces of quartz and mica transformed an otherwise unremarkable metamorphic rock into a sight straight from a fairy tale. Suddenly, she was glad she had taken the job that, from a scientific standpoint, was not particularly interesting. 

An earthquake had opened this fissure recently, and her objective was to examine the system of newly formed caves. She was not sure what the expedition’s financiers expected her to find here, except for seemingly endless walls of gneiss. Still, the trip was a lovely way to escape the daily routine of her university job – it had been a while since Lindra had had the opportunity to leave her laboratory for actual field work, and even without any surprising findings, the cave was lovely enough to make up for the lack of results.

Lindra knew she should pack her things together, gather her rock samples and make her way back to the camp, where she would meet her colleagues and compare boring sketches of a boring rock. Still, she looked around and decided to stay a bit longer. She sat on a slab of gneiss, leaning her head against the cold rock and enjoying the peaceful atmosphere. It was quiet, with all sounds from outside being muted and broken by the rough cave walls, and when Lindra listened closely enough, she could hear the vibrations of the cave itself, a faint deep humming like a seashell held closely to an ear. 

This was why she had become a geologist in the first place, she mused. Oh, the science itself was fascinating enough, the hunt for new knowledge, the excitement of research, and yet… Another need ran deeper, the basic ways of experiencing her surroundings throwing Lindra back to her first childish explorations of the unknown world all around her, with everything big and new and shiny, the feeling that could never truly be expressed by the painstakingly accurate sketches in her field book. The cave layout was there, and Lindra had even sketched the rock’s texture in addition to taking photos and some samples. Only the magic was missing…

Smiling, Lindra looked at the cave with new eyes now. Instead of just mentally mapping the cave layout, identifying the rock type and the minerals it was made of, her child self insisted she was in a magical singing castle with the light itself bringing the spirits around her to life, every shadow with the potential of movement, every sparkling crystal a piece of magic, and Lindra herself the one to watch and to bring that magic to life simply by looking, truly looking at everything. And there, was that an eye looking back at her? While her adult self insisted it was just a crystal of feldspar that had been rounded by shear stress during the rock’s metamorphosis, her childish self – her real self – resented the knowledge and immediately discarded it. So the crystal was an eye now, and Lindra looked more closely for a view of the creature this eye belonged to. 

She could see it now! After noticing it, Lindra realized the dragon had been there all the time, watching her, and it had been herself who had been unable to see it. A dragon, half hidden inside the rock… He – Lindra just knew he was a he – was smaller than she had imagined dragons to be, only about her arm’s length, and it looked friendly. In fact, it looked at her as if asking to be set free. Of course, she would gladly oblige! 

Gently, she scratched the gneiss wall with her hammer’s pick head, following the contours of the dragon’s back. She could visualize the little creature much more clearly now, with the dim light from the entrance almost gone. Carefully, she hammered away tiny slivers of rock to free the creature’s delicate legs. Even more attention she paid to the head, helping the dragon to pull his sensitive snout from the embedding rock. The dragon helped with that, melting away stubborn mineral grains with fiery breath that heated the rock under Lindra’s hands. When she came to the wings, Lindra realized she did not have any further work to do. The shadows that had made up the wings from the corner of her eye were already moving, dancing with the last rays of sunlight falling onto Lindra’s resting spot. 

Fascinated, Lindra watched the dragon taking his first tentative steps on the cave floor. It did not occur to her to be scared – she was in a magical place, after all, and she instinctively knew the dragon belonged there, maybe even more than she herself did. It had been a part of the rock only minutes before, after all. Only joy at the little creature’s birth and newfound freedom filled her. 

“Do you want to fly?”, she asked him. The dragon tilted his head at that, seemingly confused, and Lindra remembered he had never flown before. “Come”, she said. “We will go outside, and you will fly!” She held out her hand, and, moving surprisingly quickly, the little dragon clambered on her arm. He was still moving a bit clumsily, his tail swooshing around without much coordination, but he was learning fast. Lindra stood up, holding the dragon and murmuring to him quietly, about deep caves and high night skies and freedom. She did not care about the dragon’s tiny claws ripping small holes into her shirt, or about leaving her belongings behind, her rock samples, her field book and even her hammer entirely forgotten now. The only thing that mattered, her responsibility, was giving this dragon the chance to fly. 

As soon as Lindra had set a foot outside the cave, the dragon became restless in her arms, flapping his wings and turning his snout into the wind. “You will fly”, Lindra repeated happily, letting him go. And fly he did. Having been born with the knowledge, he was up in the air immediately, and after just a few seconds disappeared from her view without any further farewell than circling her head once in a sharp curve. Laughing, Lindra went back to the camp without her supplies. No matter what she would tell her colleagues, she had brought back a bit of magic into the world.


End file.
